Free Random Acts Of Crazy by Julia Kent

gestured for me to sit on the bed, which turned out to be soft, like memory foam topped with down. I rested, stretching out, my ankles hanging over the edge of the small bed. But it felt like relaxing on a California king at the Omni in downtown Boston.
    She pulled various things out of the refrigerator and then turned on the hotplate. The clattering of a pan made me sit up. “What are you doing?”
    “Do you eat eggs?” she asked.
    I chuckled. “Are you kidding me? You’re going to make me food now? Here?”
    “Of course.”
    The room smelled like eucalyptus and lavender, a lush, heady scent of escape, of something divine being sought. I watched as she poured oil into the pan and then, in an interesting interpretation of an omelet, she just cracked the eggs, threw in cheese and something I couldn’t name, and then sprinkled a bunch of spices on top.
    “I can’t do a full omelet,” she said, turning her head to talk to me over her shoulder. “But I can at least make you a scramble that will make your stomach shut up.”
    I watched her from behind, that heart-shaped ass turned upside down, her legs thick and strong, her shoulders moving as her arms cooked for me. No one cooked for me. Hell, my mom didn’t even cook for me. Everything was prepackaged and made up and if you wanted something made from scratch, you pretty much had to wait for a holiday or to go over to a friend’s house where the mom actually cooked.
    Something stirred inside me – and it wasn’t just my ever-anxious penis. This little shed that Darla had turned into some kind of sanctuary for herself, it was like my parent’s basement for me. That felt so stupid to even think because her life was nothing like mine. A pang of ingratitude struck me. What an ungrateful little shit I had been, thinking that the fake, plastic life forced on me by my parents was something I needed to suffer through.
    Look what she had created for herself in the middle of all this misery. It made me feel inadequate. It made me feel like a wimp. I didn’t want to go to law school. I wanted to sing, I wanted to go on tour, see what I could make for myself from this world that I loved to taste and touch…. I wanted to take music and turn it into this – a thing that looked shabby on the outside, but was beautiful and whole from the inside, all I really needed. And because that could only be some part time side gig that my parents barely tolerated, I thought that was real pain, a real dilemma. Compared to what Darla had overcome, I could see I was a fool.
    Darla
    Letting Trevor see my little hideaway was worse than stripping naked and walking down the middle of the street where all the bars were downtown on the first day of hunting season. Thank God he had taken it the way I had hoped – with a sense of delight. I had mixed feelings about that look on his face, though, because it was so different from the one that had crossed his faced when he’d walked into the trailer and seen Mama.
    I had a love/hate relationship with my relationship with Mama. This wasn’t the life that I was meant to live, and when the owner of the trailer park had told me, a few years ago when he caught me smoking pot in the potting shed, that I could use it however I wanted, I took him at his word. Hey, don’t blame me – smoking pot in a potting shed sounded really, really funny at 4:20, you know? I’d dispensed with most of that, though, by the time I’d graduated high school. Getting high was just a way to escape and if you were never really going to escape, why bother?
    Painting the walls had been easiest. Finding a can of discarded but unused paint for five bucks at the recycling center a few towns over meant that I could cover the walls in a bright color that made me happy. Anything but yellow. Anything but yellow would do.
    The bed was a funny little contraption. I went on the internet and looked for plans for a simple bed, and it turned out I could do it with some thick pieces of